working out what makes screenplays work

Tag: theme

As part of their ongoing exploration of scene-work, Stu and Chas apply their earlier thinking on theme and character worldview to individual scenes. Can examining a scene from a thematic perspective impact the drama, conflict or stakes of the scene? How does your character’s conscious and subconscious world views dramatise the overall theme of the work? How can an individual scene reflect the larger themes of the overall story? Do any of these questions or approaches lead to writing better scenes?

To this end, Stu and Chas examine particular scenes from works that have particularly apparent, strong and consistent themes; namely: FINDING NEMO, EX MACHINA, MANCHESTER BY THE SEA and the Netflix TV series GLOW.

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What screenwriting lessons can be we learn from SPLIT? In our first (and perhaps last) one-shot, we take a close look at the M. Night Shyamalan’s SPLIT. Rather than having one topic with many examples, we use the one example to look at many topics. Well, okay, a few topics. Firstly, we take the opportunity to […]

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Stu and Chas look at one of the basic building blocks of a script: scene transitions. Transitions don’t just move you from one scene to another in a slick way, they can help you compress time, enhance thematic connections, unify different story threads, orient (or disorient) your reader… and just make your script feel more like a movie.

To help us see how scenes connect & collide in interesting ways, we take a close look at scripts of films with great transitions to see how much of the work was done by the writer (as opposed to the director or editor): SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD, HIGHLANDER, AMERICAN SPLENDOR and BOYHOOD.

And then, in backmatter we take a self-reflective look at TIME MANAGEMENT (and naps).